Chinese Chef's Knives

A Chinese chef knife is a multi-purpose kitchen knife. Many professional Asian chefs pride themselves on their skill with this knife. While it is designed for chopping, dicing and mincing vegetables and fruits with an easy rocking motion, many Asian chefs use it for just about everything, from paring to detailed carving of vegetable and fruit garnishes. The wide, flat blade of the knife can be used to transfer freshly chopped food from the cutting board, and the round wooden or steel handle makes for an excellent pestle for crushing garlic, ginger or galangal.

When choosing your Chinese chef knife, one of the main considerations is the edge type. Chinese chef knives with a hollow ground edge – an edge that is ground on both sides – can slice more thinly than those with a straight edge. For slicing juicy or soft items, a granton, or kullenshliff edge is ideal, since the grooves on the blade will provide better contact with the surface area of the food item being cut. The kullenschliff edge on these chef’s knives will introduce air between the knife and the food being sliced, this will allow the food to fall away from the knife instead of sticking to the blade.

Despite their looks the Chinese chef knife is quite a versatile and agile knife, but it takes quite a bit of skill to become accustomed to. Consider a knife with a slight curve to the blade, this will facilitate a rocking motion when chopping so the knife doesn’t have to leave the cutting surface and also make it much faster to prepare ingredients like fresh vegetables and more.